One of the first film festivals of the very-quickly-approaching year of 2015 will be the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme (JFTFP), which will kick off in London on January 30th and travel around the country until late March, with Bristol, Belfast, Derby, Birmingham, Dundee, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Newcastle upon Tyne, Kendal (Cumbria) and Nottingham all being planned tour stops. As always, a good dozen films (most fairly recent, a few older) will be on show, all connected through a thematic link, summarised in the 2015 festival titleIt Only Happens in the Movies? Continue reading →

Belatedly here are the South East Asian entries at the London Film Film Festival, aka the-biggest-film-event-in-the-UK-that-doesn’t-know-how-to-get-its-act-together-to-implement-a-functional-booking-system. Yeah, I’m presently mad at the BFI and their apology (excuses!) does nothing to lessen that. It’s not the first time this has happened, in fact it was worse than last year.

Anyhow, we get films from Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. Most have already screened elsewhere as the LFF isn’t really a pioneering, world-premiering event, at least not when it comes to Asian films. The absence of Miyazaki’s「風立ちぬ」(Kaze Tachinu/The Wind Rises, Japan, 2013), which has been/is screening in Toronto, Venice, San Sebastián and now Hawaii, from the programme only confirms this.

Here are the (available) trailers and one-sentence synopses, by country: Continue reading →

Seen at the monthly Films at the Embassy of Japan event, at a special screening commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Chosyu Five’s arrival in London. The film had an additional screening at University College London (UCL), the institution where the Chosyu Five became the first Japanese students in Great Britain.

Note: 長州 [ちょうしゅう] is romanised both as Chōshū as well as Chosyu.

Chōshū faibu is as much a film about the past as it is one about the present and even the future. It reminds us of a time that is so distant, so different from the now we live in that we can barely relate to it, but simultaneously reveals, if we look closely enough, that not only connections remain, but that some things have not changed at all.